


Alte Liebe rostet nicht

by tasteofhysteria



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-26
Updated: 2012-05-26
Packaged: 2017-11-06 01:26:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/413196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tasteofhysteria/pseuds/tasteofhysteria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was an era defined by a Wall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

May 8th, 1945

“So before you go on one of your self-righteous tirades, let me just say that this was all my fault.”

Germany paused in his tacit examination of the table’s wood grain to slowly lift his gaze to rest on his elder brother. Prussia had his mud-encrusted boots propped up on the table as he leaned back in the chair, seeming to be more like a noble in a plush seat than the prisoner in a roughly hewn chair. He was paler than normal, but he seemed unbothered by the gauze wrapped around his head to cover his left eye.

“And how,” Germany asked, “did you come to that conclusion?”

“It’s really a simple solution, Brüderlein,” Prussia lifted a bruised and scraped hand into the air with a flourish, as if he was dictating a memoir or conducting a symphony. “I am entirely at fault here. I raised you too goddamned well.”

Germany glared at him. Prussia paused for a moment before launching into his explanation with gusto.

“I raised you impeccably, to be the perfect fucking soldier, to have a flawless work ethic. And you know what all that bullshit led to?”

“Cuckoo clocks.” Germany replied flatly.

“Wrong!” Prussia crowed, letting his chair fall forward so he could leer over the table at his brother. “Wrong wrong wrong! It led to a table, Brüderlein! A table rather like this one;  a table that wouldn’t blow up even if you stuck a kilogram of explosives underneath it just to kill one man!” 

Germany stared ahead stonily as Prussia laughed to himself hoarsely, slumping against the table so that his face was hidden in his folded arms. The disturbing echoes of it faded away and Prussia turned his head the barest amount of degrees upward to look at his brother with his good eye from underneath a fall of pale hair.

“So it was all my fault,” he repeated, “even if it felt more like you were just dragging me along for the ride. I just wanted to ask you something, Brüderlein.”

Germany blinked in confusion and frowned at his brother. “Yes?”

The door creaked open with a metallic squeal and the people behind it shuffled in loudly, none louder than America. Prussia sat up slowly and gave Germany a slow, meaningful smirk as the allied nations carried on their conversations, not yet paying attention to the brothers.

“Was it good for you too?” he asked quietly, words nearly lost in the surrounding noise


	2. Chapter 2

Russia was cruel even in his supposed kindness.  
  
He bandaged Prussia’s damaged eye with exaggerated care and a wide, silent smile. Prussia was gingerly manhandled to an antiquated chaise lounge with faded golden accents and a film projector was laid out on a low table nearby, an unlabeled reel of film propped up against it.  
  
“I was feeling nostalgic today,” Russia said in a bright contrast to Prussia’s stony silence.  The other nation regarded Russia with his one ruby-toned eye, lips pressed into a hard line and face impassive. Russia simply smiled at him sweetly and tweaked the albino’s nose mockingly before turning to load the film into the projector, fiddling with the controls and pulling down the white projector screen on the wall, all the while humming a tune that made Prussia sit up even straighter than before, his stoic expression marred by a slight sneer.  
  
 _“Grün, grün, grün sind alle meine Kleider. Grün, grün, grün ist alles, was ich hab…”_  
  
The reel clicked loudly and the lights were dimmed low. A countdown began on the screen, accompanied by small ticking noises. A single beep sounded before a sudden flurry of German burst forth in cheerful narration. Prussia’s breath escaped his chest all at once as he stared in disbelief at the grayscaled figures flickering into life.  
  
Soldiers. German soldiers. They were laughing and jostling each other in a too-familiar mess hall for the camera as tinny music played in the background. The light-hearted scene shifted into a more somber setting under the voice’s unerringly jovial narrative. The film showed a training session in a small field behind a nondescript mortar brick building, all the men moving in unison like a well-oiled machine. The drill sergeants patrolled the neat lines, shouting silently as the narrator outlined the daily schedule of the average soldier.  
  
Just as suddenly as the film cut to another scene, Gilbert was face-to-face with his younger brother’s stern but approving face glowing in black and white as the tall man overlooked his soldiers going through their training exercises. Prussia’s teeth clenched and ground together until his jaw ached and his lip bled and dripped slowly from the abuse. Russia watched the film with polite but bored interest, clearly more interested in watching Prussia’s reaction from his peripheral.  
  
The camera’s focus shifted again to light upon another field officer shouting orders.  Prussia sat up with a strangled noise. He’d lost him, lost sight of him again—  
  
But just in the corner, Ludwig was barely visible. He was bent slightly over, with an exasperated look on his face as Gilbert himself appeared on the screen, slinging a companionable arm over his younger brother’s shoulders and pulling the taller man down for a teasing fraternal kiss to the cheek. Germany’s blush was even visible without true to life colours and the Other Gilbert was laughing.  
  
It would’ve been missed entirely if one didn’t know where to look.  
  
Gilbert leaned back slowly, feeling something gnawing angrily in his gut alongside the sense of ridiculous and misplaced relief.  
  
The documentary continued and Ludwig did not appear again. Prussia let his eye slide closed to just feel the sound of his own language rising like a welcome tide in his ears, drowning and saturating himself with what he used to be.  
As suddenly as it started, it ended with a small trumpet fanfare and the obnoxious noise of Russia’s quiet applause.  
  
“Ah, the good old days,” Russia cooed as the reel clacked noisily in the projector, “I find I miss them more and more as the days go on. Don’t you?”  
  
“Why did you do that?” Prussia asked. He kept his eye closed, letting himself keep the image of his heartlands in tinted gray stuck in his mind. There was the rustle of fabric as a warning before Prussia’s chin was seized by leather-clad fingers and his lips were seared with cold. Russia laughed as he pulled away, turning Prussia’s head to examine him from any angle he desired.  
  
“Maybe,” he said, “I just felt like being nice on your birthday.”  
  
“It’s not my birthday,” Prussia retorted. Russia’s smile spread wider.  
  
“Then maybe I just felt like being nice.”  
  
“Or maybe you just felt like being a fucking asshole—”  
  
Gilbert’s head was twisted to a painful angle at that and he felt cold breath ghosting over his jugular as Russia began to hum again.  
  
 _“Darum lieb ich alles was so grün ist…”_  
  
“Fuck you!” Prussia snarled, trying to free his arm and shove the Russian away. Ivan smiled and released him, patting Prussia’s head like a dog before standing and stretching.  
  
“How is Berlin these days? I thought you would know better than I.”  
  
Prussia looked away stubbornly and Russia left the room without another word.  
  
When it had grown dark, Prussia sat on the bed in his piss-poor excuse for a room, back pressed against a corner as he scrawled clumsily on a scrap of paper by the candle someone had thoughtfully (or stupidly, depending on the destructiveness of his mood) lit for him.  
  
 _“I saw your face in a film tonight. I wanted to touch the screen. I’ll never be cruel again.”  
_  
He stared down at the messy words on the grease-spotted scrap and then stared out the window at the white wasteland that stretched in every direction.  
  
Prussia held the paper up to the candle, letting the flame devour it and allowing it to lick at his fingertips for a few moments, relishing the warmth even as it burned him.  
  
He was going fucking insane in this place and he knew it.  
  
He laughed and slid down the wall, letting his spine flop against the mattress and settle into the thin pillow before he started to shout.  
  
 _“Darum lieb ich alles was so grün ist. Weil mein Schatz ein Jäger, Jäger ist—!”_


	3. Chapter 3

“I haven’t seen him.”   
  
She was lying to his face, not meeting his eyes and rearranging her few meager possessions silently, even as the wrathful noise of a riot surrounded the tiny apartment outside. Germany bit the inside of his cheek in irritation, trying to retain his composure.   
  
“Hungary.”   
  
She glanced up at him through a stringy mass of tangled and unwashed hair and then away to the aged and wrinkled sheet of handwritten musical score she was compulsively flattening between her palms.   
  
“I haven’t seen him,” she insisted in a high-pitched voice, eyes darting to each of the cracked windows as if Russia himself would be standing there with his nose pressed against the glass and fogging it up with his breath as he smiled at them serenely. Germany’s lips thinned into a painfully straight line as he stared down at her.   
  
“I was told,” he intoned, “that my brother passed through. I lost his trail here and I’m just looking for another lead. I just thought that you—you two had been friends, so I thought—”   
  
“Call it friendship if it makes you feel better,” Hungary retorted bitterly, “because being  _friends_  with him has never done any of us a bit of good. I haven’t seen him.”   
  
“Elizaveta.  _Please._ ”   
  
“How is Roderich?” she asked instead, turning away to reach for a faded red ribbon to tie her hair back. Nothing betrayed Germany’s expression except for a slight twitch in his eyebrow as she faced him again with a neutral expression save for the barely there uplift at the corner of her lips.   
  
“Never mind. I can probably guess. He’s doing just as well as ever, seated on his pretty chaise lounge and sipping some imported tea with 3 sugar cubes,  _exactly_  a teaspoon of cream, and his damned sachertorte as if none of this ever happened. Typical. What an excellent sense of priorities he always had.  _Typical._ ”   
  
“He’s in his wheelchair again.”   
  
Hungary blinked, staring at Germany as if waiting for the punchline of a particularly unfunny joke. When his stoic expression remained in place, her face broke into the most beautiful smile he’d seen from her in decades.   
  
“Is that so?” she said, “I didn’t—well then. Is that so? Really?”   
  
“Elizaveta, I understand if you’re upset…” Germany began tentatively. She beamed at him and brushed imaginary dust from his shoulders before straightening his collar.   
  
“Upset?” she asked brightly, “I’m not upset. That’s the best news I’ve heard in ages.”   
  
Slightly unsettled, he groped in his pocket for the folded envelope he had been entrusted with.   
  
“He sent this for you.”   
  
_“It’s likely that she won’t want it,” Austria murmured quietly, staring down at the paper as he tapped his chin thoughtfully with the end of his pen and tried to think of what to write next.  
  
“But she was your wife—”  
  
“Was,” Austria echoed Germany quietly, looking up to smile at the blonde man sardonically. The Austrian glanced back down at the page and its shakily written words with distaste.  
  
“Abominable penmanship,” he remarked disdainfully, “still, I suppose it bestows all of this with a sense of remorse, doesn’t it? What a ridiculous sentiment.”  
  
“Why couldn’t you just apologize if you’re sorry?”  
  
Austria set his pen down tranquilly and folded his hands in his lap to stare back at Germany coolly.  
  
“She already thinks of me as the most pathetic excuse for a man as has ever lived on this earth. If I deigned to apologize to her, she’d never forgive me. Trying to excuse myself would just make me more irredeemable in her eyes. She wants me to be a villain, and so I shall.”  
  
Germany sighed and leaned against the parlor’s doorframe tiredly.  
  
“That makes no sense, Austria.”  
  
“The relationship between she and I is a long one. It is old and dented and tarnished, but it works just as it always has. Therefore, I am determined to see that it always will. Something like this will strain it, but never break it. And so, if she wishes to hate me, she may.”  
  
“But why?”  
  
“Because,” Austria folded the paper into precise fourths, then into eighths, and then slid it into a envelope, “I am a gentleman, she is my wife, and I love her. It is the occupation of a gentleman to see to his wife’s happiness.”_   
  
Hungary stared at the proffered envelope coldly.   
  
“If you were going to bring me tinder for the fire, I wish you’d brought something a bit more substantial.”   
  
“He said you probably wouldn’t want it.”   
  
“Wait—”   
  
Germany held the letter away from Hungary’s grasping hands, aloft and out of her reach.   
  
“Where is he, Hungary?”   
  
“I already told you that I haven’t seen him,” she hissed as she stretched for the envelope held overhead.   
  
“You’re lying.”   
  
“I’m not!” she screamed, “Prussia did pass through, yes. But he was caught crossing the border and he was sent back! That’s all I know, for the love of God! Now give me that—!”   
  
The blonde lowered his arm and she snatched the note away and clutched it to her chest protectively.   
  
“That’s all I know,” she repeated, “and now I’ll have to be a terrible hostess and insist you leave.”   
  
He inclined his head to her politely and turned for the door, the sound of an envelope being ripped open and clumsily written German being read by untutored lips following him down the shoddy hall.   
  
An enraged shriek and the clamor of something being thrown through a window greeted him outside, a downpour of glass shards shadowing his steps as he looked northeast while he walked northwest.


	4. Chapter 4

“West—”   
  
“No,” Germany snapped at last, “I don’t want you to call me that. I spent the last 40 years being called that by everyone who  _wasn’t_  you, and I don’t want to hear it anymore. ‘West’ is not my name and it hasn’t been even when you started calling me that ages ago.”   
  
Prussia stared at him silently and Germany realized quietly that the skeletal thing on the bed was not (for now, yet, hadn’t been, would not be) his brother. It was the remnants of something that had been crafted with an artisan’s precision from lily-pale alabaster, embossed and engraved and embroidered with War. Now it was blanched past the beauty of fair complexion into something that was bleached with the achromicity of illness, jaundiced with an opiate poison, and it rattled like old dry bones.   
  
Whatever it was, it was not his brother. Yet.   
  
“I know it isn’t your name,” it replied, “I know it isn’t one you prefer. It’s not your fucking name, but it is a name that I gave you, so you’ll fucking take it and be grateful. I always give you everything and that name is everything to me.”   
  
“And what is that supposed to mean?” Germany was hardly in the mood to deal with Prussia’s flippancy when the albino was already the world’s most trying patient.   
  
“It was my dream.”   
  
Four words were spoken with such a worn bitterness that Germany paused from where he’d been arranging the remaining books on the shelf (all German writers, no biographies, nothing English and no Russian) to glance over his shoulder at his older brother. Prussia was bent almost in half, clutching the linen sheets as if they were his only anchor to keep him from floating away to die, his face creased in anger.   
  
“It was my dream to see you grow so strong that you moved past all those borders they forced you into, taking in everything and moving west and getting stronger until you came back to me from the other side of the world. And you would have been so goddamned  _beautiful_ .”   
  
“And what would happen when I came back?”   
  
Prussia looked over at him with red-rimmed eyes and gave Germany a thin, tight-lipped smile.   
  
“And then I’d want you to take me in as well.”


End file.
